Perch @perchingpath@eldritch.cafe

Gayfeather, colic-root, rattlesnake-master, blazing star,( devil's bite, Cahaba torch, prairie-pine,) I took your list to that fireworks store in Upland, gathered & checked off each rocket, then imagined how you'd stare at a forest fire (guilty? gleeful?) as I put them all back.

Hawk moths and feral parakeets have begun frequenting the garden this week. As your augur, I advise you to cultivate an air of exoticism, however false or shallow.

Spitting on my fingers to skim the dust from every leaf of the ivy.

Like a sea urchin, and the spines are knives, densely distributed, and their points have been tide-rolled against the sand, & are gone just dull enough not to prick you if you're gentle tossing & catching the urchin in your palm. Like a croquet ball. Like an apple.

She said, "Here... I brought you a surprise!" and handed me a crumpled paper bag stained & dripping with thin red fluid. It was raspberries, a real top-rank gift, but now I'm going to be all miscued for a future menacing delivery from my next stalker or whatever.

My armature was strolling sightless in the rose garden when I formed around it, catalyzed by an assistant set-dresser placing the fifth candle in a six-armed girandole.
They fired her last week for scraping an applewood caryatid's thigh. I heard the shouting and feigned confusion tinged with dread; my patron was present.

eXistenZ is so dense with moments that have me clasping my hands to my chest in unadulterated glee.

If I were in the woods and I happened upon an uncanny gossamer mask hung staring between aspens I'd wear it immediately & wear it forever. You have no way of knowing if I've done that, none. My eyes being as dark as they were in childhood could be a coincidence.

The circus is intrinsically homoerotic, and all stabs at staging an emphatically heterosexual circus, like last night's, are going to be not just off-putting but pervasively self-undermining.

I blamecreditblame my immoderately sober youth mostly on my inarticulable terror of ever losing my reserve in case I Said Something, but also partially on reading Vurt at 13-ish and having my standards for quasi-sexual drug administration set almost impractically high.

You should buy me a drink sometime, after we're all dead. I'll order a communard, and when it seeps through my sere ribs and the madder stains spread across my blouse, I'll widen my flat, cloudy eyes with the angelic innocence of having told a sublimely hack joke.

A few months ago I turned to my mother as we stepped into AIDS Thrift from a turbulent gale & said, "Huh, I hope my hair's not too fucked up," then gasped because I'd never said "fucked up" before and was startled to hear it in my voice.

The two most sought-after conclusion cards are "The next part is easy" & "You don't need to kill him anymore", but they're only distributed at 1 each per 200-pack case so you really have to keep setting up alibis & boltholes while you scrounge for card money.

Gayfeather, colic-root, rattlesnake-master, blazing star,( devil's bite, Cahaba torch, prairie-pine,) I took your list to that fireworks store in Upland, gathered & checked off each rocket, then imagined how you'd stare at a forest fire (guilty? gleeful?) as I put them all back.

Not in the published edition, anyway. Boswell's epilogue, Feast of Johnson, only circulated as a barely legible pamphlet, evading republication by consistently disappointing both the prurient & the hungry with its reticence.

From William Joseph Showalter's biography of Asarum canadense in The Book of Wild Flowers. "...the fungus gnats and the flesh flies are early on the job..." Mmm. No mention of its roots being delicious & contributive to renal failure, but one doesn't usually focus on the effects of consuming one's biographee.

I begin referring to sweat as "animalic acid" in my formulae as a matter of style. You assume I mean gastric fluid or bile & go to a great deal of fuss for nothing. I apologize profusely. We relate the anecdote at our wedding as we wait for the tincture in our guests' champagne to take effect.

Just scratched a long bloody line down the center of my chest by pulling on yesterday's shirt without checking the pin that kept it from gapping over my tits. Breasts in the possession of the careless or untrained are a pernicious hazard & that's why I'm introducing legislation t—
And that's when the sniper hit. The full text of my bill hasn't been released to the public.

Floating out to fill the birdfeeders & feed the mosquitoes at sweltering streetlit 4 A.M. because I want to be a helpful ghost.

(Ravenous was a triumph of gore-hurts-less-than-sex homoeroticism frustratingly tainted throughout by what's probably 3 cumulative script pages of racist nonsense, and as a teen I wanted them to kiss as they bled out in that absurd trap.)

Dream of briskly, repeatedly traversing a haunted house, in the manner an army recruit might an obstacle course. If I ever let on that sourceless blood & shattering mirrors no longer perturbed me, I'd be disqualified, so I kept my eyes wide & leant hard into every stale frisson.